Tracks in the Snow
by robin baby
Summary: After having swallowed the Purgatory souls, Cas finds his way ... back. Written during the 2011 hiatus, so no leviathans! Rated for a graphic image or two, to be on the safe side. Not slash.


**Disclaimer:** The characters belong to Kripke and the CW, I just enjoy torturing them.

**A/N:** This was written sometime during the hiatus after season 6, but after it was revealed that Cas would do some "cleaning up" as God. Sam's wall (or lack thereof) is not taken into account here, mostly because this is the literary equivalent of a doodle and I was not in the mood for complications.

If that doesn't bother you, I hope you'll enjoy, and tell me in a review whether you did or not!

ooo

_Tracks in the Snow_

He loses days, weeks, months. The time is loud, _screeching_, ripped, sharp and violent in colours. He is aware of doing things, killing, destroying, but he doesn't have time to reconsider, and everything happens too fast. It is like being hurled through the motions, motions he isn't too sure were his intention, and some he knows weren't.

Soon, everything grows too bright, too loud, too fast, and he feels himself begin to tear at the edges, and crack all over the surface.

It takes so very long until he regains some footing, manages to get a hold and steady himself, at least a bit, and then gradually, gradually slow down. His fingers are cut and bloody, his insides feel as though they are pierced with knives.

Balthazar's prediction that the Purgatory souls would physically destroy him didn't come from nowhere. But Castiel had told him that wouldn't happen and it didn't. At least not in the way Balthazar anticipated.

But there was a price to pay, of course. Fifty thousand malevolent souls don't come quietly, and they aren't pleasant guests.

He nearly lost control of them. To a degree, he did. Of the first few hours, he barely has a recollection. He remembers killing Raphael, but he doesn't know what happened to Crowley. He remembers Dean's face. The words that probably passed between them are lost to him, but the eyes are, strangely, clear enough in his memory, and Castiel rarely needed much more to know what Dean was thinking. He can't recall if Dean was there alone. Perhaps he was. Castiel does remember what he did to Sam, and that he promised to fix it. He should have known that he wouldn't be able to.

This is the end. He is finally still enough, in control enough, to end it all. To put the souls back where they belong. There is no one now in Heaven who has a wish to destroy the world, by means of the apocalypse or something else. He isn't needed there. Heaven will sort itself out. They will be busy trying to learn freedom for the next century, perhaps.

For a moment, Castiel hesitates, his thoughts straining backwards, wanting to revisit some of the recent past before he loses it forever. But this ice he is walking on is thin, barely more than a skin stretched taut across a bottomless pit, and he is afraid that if he lingers a moment too long, it will shatter and he will fall, and this time too far.

So he thinks of nothing, and instead lets go of the souls. It feels like falling.

ooo

It must have been instinct. Some kind of reflex he couldn't control, because this wasn't planned. There must have been a part of him that found a spark of his grace somewhere amongst the tumult of the souls and held on to it, for dear life. He felt it rush away with everything else, so fast it made him dizzy and everything turn dark and cold. But something lingered. He still exists.

There is a hut, little more than a shed really, high up on a mountainside, he doesn't know which country, which continent. Many years ago, a landslide made it inaccessible, so there it lies, abandoned, not heeded by anyone. The wooden walls are wearing thin and the roof has holes. It is a good place to hide.

He crashes on the dirty floor and vomits blood. He tries to get up, but there isn't enough strength in him to lift even a hand, so he allows his eyes to slide shut and curls into the small, feebly glowing ball of grace that he is now, sinking down as far as he can until the howling wind fades and the cold becomes a cocoon.

ooo

Impossible to know how much time passes. He wakes up, and there is something wrong. The world outside is bathed in day, but there is a darkness, he can feel it like a drop by fifty degrees even through this place's freezing temperatures. Demon.

Weakened as he is, it is a natural reaction to flee. He cannot fight. But it seems there is too little strength in him now even to move very far. Just moments into his flight, he feels himself slipping, and the world with all its substantial and insubstantial planes slipping too, and he is falling again.

ooo

When he realizes where he is, he finds it hard to believe. He tries to understand it for a long time. There are no coincidences like this. The earth's surface measures approximately 196,939,900 square miles.

'What the hell?'

This is Dean's voice. It knocks the breath out of Castiel's lungs (figuratively speaking).

When he opens his eyes, what he sees is a bright line of silver. His lips won't move as he tries to speak, dried blood has sealed them. He tastes fresh blood when he finally forces them open to say (whisper): 'That will work now.'

ooo

It's winter, and Bobby's junkyard is covered in a blanket of snow. The morning looks crisp and clean, all blue sky.

Dean can hear Sam trudging about upstairs, just getting up. Bobby fell asleep on the couch again, baseball cap askew and a book draped across his chest. He doesn't wake even while Dean gets the coffee going.

While it's brewing, Dean grabs his car keys and heads outside, and in the direction of the Impala. He's in a gun-cleaning mood today. There is such a thing.

Halfway across the yard, he finds Castiel. Slumped against one of the broke-down cars. _What the hell?_

Castiel doesn't stir, and Dean does the first thing that comes to mind. Gets an angel blade from the Impala's trunk. He has no idea what's going on.

It takes forever for his presence to register with Castiel. 'That will work now,' the angel (or whatever) says, his voice paper-thin.

Castiel's too-blue eyes are trimmed on the blade, and his words, for some reason, make Dean's stomach churn. Perhaps because they sound like _Kill me_, and much as he tried to make himself want to do it, Dean never did. Not Cas. The thing he'd turned into, yes. But the question is, which of the two is lying crumpled in Bobby's junkyard?

'What are you doing here?' Dean asks roughly, fingers curling and uncurling around the blade's hilt.

Thirty seconds pass, and there is no reply. Dean crouches, grabs Castiel's shoulder and pushed his body into a more upright position.

The angel's face is nearly as white as the snow, the dried blood that cakes his lips almost black. And there are tears, dried trails of bloody tears.

'I'm sorry,' Castiel says. 'I didn't mean.' _To come here_, Dean supposes. 'I was falling. I lost control.'

Dean frowns. Trying to overcome the shock of the situation, trying to figure out how this is making him feel. He can hear Sam calling his name from the house. 'You lost control and you fell here?'

There's the ghost of a smile on Castiel's face. 'Strange,' he says, and Dean knows he's agreeing that this is an odd coincidence.

But then he thinks. 'Maybe not.' He stares at the snow-covered flank of whatever car Castiel is leaning against and adds, 'Maybe it was me.' Maybe a thought, halfway between anger and regret, was enough to pull a weakened angel out of the sky to this place.

He glances back at Castiel, whose eyes have found the blade again. On an impulse, Dean throws it into the snow, a few feet away from them. This isn't the creature Castiel was the last time they were face to face, that much he knows. And there is something inside Dean, something that is repulsed by the thought that Cas is expecting to die by Dean's hand.

'Hey,' he says, 'what's wrong with you? Too much juice?'

'No,' Castiel replies, 'not anymore.'

For a short while, everything becomes a little clearer, a little steadier. It's Dean's touch that does this, because there's a tiny portion of Castiel's Grace in Dean.

'You …' Dean begins. 'You got rid of them?'

Castiel smiles again, ever so faintly. 'Of course,' he whispers. Dean has the notion that there would be a lot to say about this, a lot to explain and understand, but all Castiel says is, 'But it meant letting go of much of myself as well.'

Dean feels the cold of the snow creep through his denims into his limbs, and tries to process all this. _But if this was the plan all along_, he thinks, _why the hell didn't you say?_ He has to admit that perhaps he didn't give Cas the chance to.

'You don't want to see me,' Castiel says, and somehow manages to get to his feet. Some tremor racks his body and he coughs, silently. There's fresh blood on his lips.

His hand sinks into the snow until it meets the frozen metal of old rusting car, but he can feel neither cold nor textures. For a moment he disconnects from this plane of reality, solid things, his vessel. It's as though everything is beginning to be made of ice. Too slippery to hold on to.

The bright line of silver flashes through his thoughts again, and he wishes Dean hadn't tossed it away like that, but it really doesn't matter. The next crash will kill him, he is certain of that.

Only he feels too heavy to even take flight, it's as though the whole planet were pressing down on him, dark and dusky and leaden. As his surroundings return to him, it becomes difficult to keep his eyes open. Perhaps this is what humans call tiredness.

He doesn't feel his knees buckle and the world tilt, but he feels Dean's tight grip on his shoulders. It surprises him more than anything ever has.

And Dean, well, Dean can hardly help it, it seems to have become instinctual without him even noticing it. It just took longer that it would have with Sam. Sam, whom he would forgive anything. It always seemed enough of a burden to be like that with one person. It's a revealing, dangerous thing to do, to love someone so much that they could not possibly betray you in a way that leaves something beyond repair. He doesn't know if this is the same. Probably it isn't, because Sam is always different, but that doesn't mean that things are irreparable with Cas.

They've all been somewhere, beyond the boundaries they'd told themselves they'd never cross, in places that felt all wrong because they _were_ all wrong, but seeing no other way. And come crawling back from those places, bloody and broken and _scared_, wanting only to somehow get through the nightmares, and go back to being themselves.

Maybe that's just how this life goes, for them. Maybe it means that Cas, who was supposed to be infallible, belongs with them even more now than he did before Purgatory. Because he crossed a line too to save something he loved, and now he's here again.

Castiel's head falls against his shoulder, the angel smells of blood and cold clean air, and Dean tightens his grip around his shoulder.

Maybe you're not lost as long as you can somehow find the way back.

'Alright,' Dean says. 'It's gonna be okay.'

_~ Fin.  
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